THE JED FOUNDATION / 0 →1 ENTERPRISE PRODUCT
Building the foundations for a life-saving mission.
Designing a connected ecosystem that replaces administrative gridlock with a clearer, more manageable path to sustainable mental health reform.
ROLE
Sole product designer responsible for translating JED's established program methodology and prioritized requirements into the information architecture, interaction patterns, and connected experiences of its enterprise platform, in collaboration with product management, engineering, and program stakeholders.
SCOPE
0→1 product ecosystem
STATUS
Live Product / Phased Rollout
FOCUS
Product Architecture, UX Strategy, Systems Design
ORGANIZATION
The Jed Foundation
02 / THE CHALLENGE
The program had the tools. What it didn't have was a product.
Rooted in decades of field work, The Jed Foundation (JED) equips schools with vital suicide prevention frameworks. But without a centralized product to deliver them, the tools became difficult to sustain caused by an outdated consulting model buckling under the program's growth. What was meant to guide schools through crisis turned into an endurance test, forcing busy admins to tread water indefinitely.
With years passing without a dedicated product team, workarounds multiplied and information siloed across programs. Consultants became the human glue holding a fractured ecosystem together and email became its load-bearing pillar.
The methods were there, but the execution was a labyrinth. When product and engineering teams were finally founded in 2023-24, the mission was clear. Reverse-engineer an ecosystem capable of carrying decades of operational debt.
MANY USERS & COMPETING NEEDS
PROGRAM PHASES & SHIFTING STARTING POINTS
Pre-onboarding
Onboarding
Assessments
Strategic Planning
Implementation
Sustainability
Alumni
ONGOING MULTI-YEAR PROGRAM DELIVERABLES
DIFFERENT CONTEXTS & REALITIES
Rural Schools
LGBTQA+
BIPOC
Greek Life
WIDE RANGING MENTAL HEALTH TOPICS
Depression
Anxiety
DOMAINS OF WORK
03 / FINDING THE FOUNDATION
Progress isn't always a straight line.
Before I joined, product management had mapped the legacy program journey, identified the jobs to be done, and prioritized the most pressing needs. The pain points were well documented. What remained was figuring out how to turn those insights into a product that could support the realities of the work.
THE PLAN
THE REALITY
Team turnover
New priorities
Budget changes
Schools rarely progressed through a predictable sequence of tasks. Teams turned over, budgets shifted, and priorities changed. Someone entering the program midway might inherit years of decisions, overlapping action items, and fragmented institutional knowledge with little context for what had happened or where to go next. Meanwhile, cognitively demanding manual processes consumed valuable time and energy, creating cycles of “hurry up and wait” in which the effort required to move forward prevented sustaining momentum.
THE CENTRAL DESIGN TENSION
How do you create forward momentum when the foundation is missing and the goalposts keep moving?
We needed a product that could provide structure without imposing rigidity, preserve institutional knowledge without creating administrative burden, and offer guidance without replacing the people behind it.
The path could change, but the purpose remained.
Schools didn't always progress neatly from one program to the next. Teams changed, resources disappeared, and opportunities emerged unexpectedly. But regardless of where a school was in its journey, three intentions remained constant.
01
Find the gaps
Understand what needs attention.
02
Know what works
Connect needs to evidence-based practices.
03
Be ready to act
Make the next step (and the resources to support it) instantly available when the moment arrives.
Because readiness ebbs and flows, this couldn't be a rigid task manager or a high-pressure habit tracker. Instead, we needed it to feel like a mentor. A constant, encouraging presence that met schools where they were, cheering them on even when progress looked like a single, quiet step.
04 / THE BROKEN FRAMEWORK
The tools were supposed to make the work easier.
JED's programs relied on three core tools. Assessments to spot gaps, a Playbook of evidence-based practices, and a Strategic Plan to drive action.
Together, they mapped out a multi-year journey. But in practice, keeping them moving required staggering manual grunt work. For grant-funded schools, the program felt less like a high-value toolkit and more like an expensive administrative chore—straining JED's hard-earned reputation.
4.1 / ASSESSMENTS
Find the gaps
Qualtrics questions
Printed PDFs
Collect responses
Re-enter by hand
Gathering mental health data across an entire school community should be streamlined. Instead, it relied on a legacy Qualtrics setup completely unequipped for the marathon nature of these surveys. Without a basic save-and-return feature, completion took months.
Faced with massive drop-offs, teams resorted to pre-internet time travel by printing physical PDFs, collecting answers by hand, and manually data-entrying hundreds of pages of student, faculty, and administration surveys back into the digital ether. Multiply that error-prone process by varying state mandates and complex branching logic. No wonder some schools didn't make it.
Stop optimizing the task and design for the outcome.
We inherited an operational model built on a heavy assumption that gathering a school's baseline required putting them through an administrative marathon of 300 questions in a single sitting.
To challenge that, I stripped away decades-old mechanics to isolate the actual outcome we needed. A completed survey wasn't necessary as long as we had an understanding of the school's current context across JED's comprehensive domains.
Instead of forcing an all-or-nothing approach, I adopted a progressive vision. What if the platform could eventually capture that intelligence naturally, piece by piece, as schools moved through their daily work?
While legacy machinery meant we couldn't leap to that future overnight, laying down cleaner workflows, consistent data structures, and context-carrying experiences enabled us to build the exact foundation required to make it happen.
4.2 / PLAYBOOK
Know what works
Mental health access
0 results found
The Playbook was supposed to be the ultimate cheat code by connecting schools directly to the evidence-based practices and resources they needed to fix the gaps found in their assessments.
Instead, the existing resource hub was exclusive to higher education, leaving boarding schools, high schools, and entire districts to fend for themselves. Resources were scattered across random corners of the web, links were broken, and search functionality was basically a myth. Finding the right guidance required psychic-level foresight. You pretty much had to already know what existed and where it lived. Rather than making life-saving expertise accessible, the system turned "finding help" into an elite scavenger hunt.
A library you search or a publication that stays fresh.
We inherited a traditional assumption for the Playbook that it should function as a passive, static archive where schools browse a fixed resource library independently.
To challenge that, I looked at what JED already had right in front of us. A dedicated team member whose core expertise was curating that knowledge and shifted the model from a silent database to a living editorial experience. Instead of rigid categories, the team and I adopted modular components designed to support rotating, timely content that greeted schools with something fresh upon every return.
That shift enabled the Playbook to do double-duty. It still served as a dependable search engine when schools needed direct answers, but it also transformed into an actively curated guide connecting educators with expertise they didn't even know to look for.
4.3 / STRATEGIC PLAN
Be ready to act
50 columns
800+ rows
The Strategic Plan was meant to turn expert recommendations into long-term initiatives that schools could actually implement, track, and adapt over time. In practice, it meant wrestling with a Google spreadsheet featuring roughly 50 columns and 800 rows of data gridlock, shrunk down to an eye-straining 8-point text.
Teams were expected to use this monster to coordinate responsibilities, log progress, and pivot over a two-year span. Instead, its unwieldy mass made it nearly impossible to navigate, update, or hand off when staff inevitably turned over. A digital artifact straight out of an administrative horror movie.
Measure the journey they're on. Not every journey they could take.
We inherited a heavy operational assumption that JED's massive framework of seven prevention domains and a cosmic backlog of action steps should be treated as a mandatory, all-inclusive to-do list for every school.
To challenge that, I stepped back to look at what progress actually meant. Recognizing that forcing schools to tackle every theoretical item on paper meant they could make life-changing strides in their community yet still look like a failing student.
Instead of an unyielding checklist, I advocated for a targeted approach. Calibrating progress solely against the specific gaps and goals each school actually chose to tackle. That shift enabled a complete transformation of the experience—keeping the full framework accessible when needed, while turning the progress tracker into a true reflection of reality rather than an endless guilt trip of unfinished work.
FRAMEWORK-CENTERED TRACKING
How much is left?
Illustrative: 3 of 40 possible actions
Even meaningful progress looks insignificant against the entire catalog.
GOAL-CENTERED TRACKING
How far have we come?
Illustrative: 3 of 5 selected priorities
Progress reflects the work the school actually committed to doing.
05 / THE DESIGN
Helping people see just how far they can go.
Schools didn’t need another platform shaming them with a backlog of unaccomplished tasks. Instead, we met them in the trenches.
These realities varied wildly. Some schools had dedicated teams and resources, while others performed miracles with almost nothing. Progress looked different for everyone whether this meant launching a major initiative, revisiting a past decision, or just finding the bandwidth to restart after a long summer break. By honoring their true baseline, I ensured every next step would feel achievable and worth their weight in gold.
Start where you are
Make it easy to enter, return, or pick up halfway through without starting over.
Every step counts
Make incremental progress visible, meaningful, and worth celebrating.
Zero guesswork
Keep relevant guidance, resources, and human support close at hand.
06 / START WHERE YOU ARE
A place to pick up where you left off.
We inherited an onboarding assumption that users should step into a massive, wide-open program and figure out the landscape on their own. To challenge that, I advocated for a shift away from overwhelming navigation, designing the dashboard to rely on progressive disclosure instead.
Instead of an unguided sea of data, the team and I adopted a phased approach that met users right where they were in their journey by surfacing immediate tasks, previewing what’s next, and making help easy to find along the way.
That shift allowed users to spend less time playing detective trying to figure out what to do and more time feeling completely capable of actually doing it.
07 / EVERY STEP COUNTS
Progress doesn't have to be perfect to matter.
We inherited an ambitious operational assumption that schools should navigate JED's massive framework of hundreds of rows of action steps like a universal manual for every race imaginable, rather than a plan tailored to the one they were actually running.
To challenge that disconnect, I stepped in to transform the core experience by moving away from a daunting spreadsheet to treat the plan as a focused, collaborative workspace. Instead of an unyielding list of everything theoretically possible, the team and I adopted a targeted model where schools could zero in on what was in scope, highlight practices they already had in place, and break big goals into manageable steps.
That shift enabled a powerful new mindset. By clearly separating baseline foundations from active program progress, the experience finally communicated what the old spreadsheet never could—that schools weren't starting from zero and meaningful change didn't require finishing everything.
08 / ZERO GUESSWORK
The right knowledge, right when you need it.
JED had an enormous body of evidence-based knowledge, but schools shouldn't need to become experts in navigating a resource library before they could benefit from that expertise. I designed the Playbook around two complementary experiences.
8.1 / CURATED EXPERIENCE
Guidance that finds you
Tying relevant resources directly to active tasks while honoring school context and preserving the consultant's expert authority.
8.2 / DISCOVERY EXPERIENCE
Knowledge you can explore
Allowing users to instantly search the entire library by topic, domain, audience, or resource type as needs evolve.
Each resource provides context about its purpose and, where applicable, its relationship to the school's Strategic Plan, helping people move between learning and doing without losing their place.
09 / THE MEASUREMENT JOURNEY
Every journey deserves a before and after with logistics behind the curtain.
We inherited a logistical assumption that administering high-stakes assessments meant putting everyday users through a brutal gauntlet of branching survey versions, custom state mandates, and brittle, hardcoded links for every institution.
To challenge that, I stepped in to redesign the core architecture by turning a tangled web of configuration instructions into a streamlined, repeatable delivery engine.
Instead of forcing users to wade through complex machinery, the team and I adopted a clean authentication flow with a clever school-selection step that decoupled school metadata directly from the survey URL.
That shift enabled a massive operational upgrade. A single, elegant entry point could now serve multiple institutions effortlessly, proving that getting the right questions to the right people shouldn't require a masterclass in logistics.
THE MEASUREMENT
Before
After
Baseline
Post-program
Four years of learning, adapting, and acting
10 / THE BIGGER PICTURE + WHAT CHANGED
From treading water to finding their current.
For years, schools weren't just running mental health programs—they were carrying the weight of them. Information had to be gathered, translated, hauled across disconnected tools, and maintained by hand. Every step forward seemed to spawn a new administrative chore, leaving already stretched teams working overtime just to stay afloat.
Our team wanted to flip that equation entirely. Instead of forcing people to manually haul their data from one experience to the next, I advocated for and designed a connected ecosystem where the work you do in one place automatically populates the next, ensuring information is captured once and spread evenly across the platform.
The aim was to make heavy institutional data weightless so that a brand-new team member could inherit years of progress on Day One without needing an archaeology degree to understand it.
And most importantly, we reminded people of their own power. Systemic change can feel suffocating when you’re one person drowning in a hundred competing priorities. But when the right knowledge, guidance, and next step are waiting in your pocket, that same person stops treading water and starts showing others how to sail.
That's why we do what we do.
THE HUB
Start where you are
ASSESSMENTS
Find the gaps
PLAYBOOK
Know what works
STRATEGIC PLAN
Be ready to act
Less work to do the work that matters.
What used to cripple teams was finally brought together into a single, breathing ecosystem.
Instead of playing data archaeologist, schools could celebrate where they stood, build action steps together, and find guidance on their own. Consultants traded manual workflow management for high-value guidance, and even our strongest skeptics—initially resistant to automating familiar manual processes—quickly turned into advocates for further change.
For the organization, we built a scalable foundation of reusable product patterns rather than adding another fragmented tool to the stack.
But the shift I cared about most lived on the other side of the screen. The school social worker sitting at their desk, feeling entirely underwater beneath the sheer weight of institutional mental health reform. Because instead of an overwhelming mountain of tasks, they could finally see their baseline, recognize the ground they'd already covered, and spot exactly where their next step mattered.